"About Application Performance Management" in the Enterprise Manager online help

4.2 Summary of Application Performance Management Configuration Tasks

The configuration tasks in this chapter allow you to take advantage of four distinct features of Application Performance Management. Each of these features is available from the Web Application target home page (Figure 4-1).

4.3 Configuring Transaction Performance Monitoring

Basic configuration, in which you create a Web Application target and Enterprise Manager automatically begins monitoring your application based on the home page URL you provide when you create the target

Advanced configuration, in which you optionally identify multiple remote Beacons and transactions to more accurately measure the availability and performance of you application

Transaction tracing configuration, in which you configure Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE (OC4J) so you can analyze the performance of the servlets, JSPs, EJB, and JDBC components that comprise your Web application

The following sections describe these configuration levels in more detail.

4.3.1 Basic Configuration of Transaction Performance Monitoring

To begin monitoring a Web application with Enterprise Manager:

Install an Oracle Management Agent on each of the host computers where your Web application components reside.

This step is required so you can manage all the components of your Web Application with the Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control. For example, if your Web application depends upon a back-end database as a data source, install the Management Agent on the database host so you can manage the database from the Grid Control.

"Creating Web Application Targets" in the Enterprise Manager online help

As you create this new Web Application target, add each of the managed targets that comprise the Web application.

For example, be sure to include components such as the Oracle HTTP Server and the OC4J instance you used to deploy your application. Also include any backend databases you are using as a data source and the Oracle Application Server Web Cache instance you are using to improve the performance of your Web application.

See Also:

"About Beacons" in the Enterprise Manager online help

As soon as the Web Application appears in your list of managed targets, Enterprise Manager begins monitoring your application using the Local Beacon that is provided with the Management Agent you identified as the Monitoring Agent when you created the Web Application target.

This Local Beacon uses the home page URL you provided when you created the Web Application target to check the availability and performance of the application at periodic intervals.

You can see the results of the home page URL transaction by viewing the Web Application home page, which includes a chart that shows the average response time of the home page URL each time it is run by the Local Beacon (Figure 4-1).

4.3.2 Advanced Configuration of Transaction Performance Monitoring

By default, when you first create a Web Application target, the Local Beacon attempts to access the application's home page URL at periodic intervals. When the Beacon successfully accesses this URL, Enterprise Manager considers your Web application available to your users.

See Also:

"About Web Application Availability" in the Enterprise Manager online help

Beyond the default home page URL and Local Beacon, you can customize your Web application as follows:

To obtain more detailed information about the performance of pages other than the home page URL, you can create additional transactions to measure the availability and performance of specific pages or features of your application.

You create additional transactions by using the Manage Transactions link on the Administration page of the Web Application target home page.

See Also:

"Creating Transactions" in the Enterprise Manager online help

To monitor the availability and performance of your application from multiple locations on your Intranet or on the Internet, you can identify additional Beacons to run your availability transactions.

You add additional Beacon targets to the Grid Control by selecting Beacon from the Add drop-down list on the Agent home page. Use the Manage Beacons link on the Administration page of the Web Application target home page to identify which Beacon targets are used to monitor your Web application.

See Also:

"Using Beacons to Monitor Web Application Availability" in the Enterprise Manager online help

4.3.3 Configuring Business Transaction Tracing

When you use transactions to monitor your Web application, some of the transactions you create often involve application components such as servlets, Java Server Pages (JSPs), Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs), and JDBC connections. Often, the best way to solve a performance problem is to trace these more complex transaction and analyze the time spent processing each back-end application component.

Enterprise Manager provides a mechanism for tracing these transactions. Use the Manage Transactions link on the Administration page on the Web Application target home page to create your transactions and to trace the transactions as they are processed by the servlets, JSPs, EJBs, or JDBC connections of your application.

However, before you can take advantage of transaction tracing, you must first enable tracing for the OC4J instance used to deploy the application.

To enable tracing for an OC4J instance:

Navigate to the OC4J Home page in the Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Application Server Control.

Click Administration to display the Administration page.

On the Administration page, click Server Properties.

In the Command Line Options section of the Server Properties page, click Tracing Properties.

Enterprise Manager displays the Tracing Properties page.

Select the three check boxes to enable general, interactive, and historical tracing.

Click Help for more information about enabling OC4J tracing.

See Also:

"Enabling OC4J Tracing" in the Enterprise Manager online help

Click Apply.

Enterprise Manager prompts you to restart the OC4J instance.

Click Yes to restart the instance.

4.4 Configuring End-User Response Time Monitoring

After you have performed the basic configuration tasks for Transaction Performance Monitoring, you can then configure End-User Response Time Monitoring.

The following steps describe how to enable End-User Response Time Monitoring after you have configured Transaction Performance Monitoring in the Grid Control. Specifically, this procedure assumes you have created a Web Application target that includes at least one instance of Oracle Application Server Web Cache.

Note:

To enable End-User Response Time Monitoring for a Web Application target, you must be using Oracle Application Server Web Cache to improve the performance of your Web application and the Oracle Application Server Web Cache instance you are using must be listed as a managed target in the Grid Control.

End-User Response Time Monitoring uses data from Oracle Application Server Web Cache to gather statistics about the performance of pages within your Web applications. As a result, you must configure Oracle Application Server Web Cache so it logs your Oracle Application Server Web Cache activity and that the data is in the correct format.

When Oracle Application Server Web Cache is properly configured, End-User Response Time Monitoring can begin collecting the end-user performance data and load it into the Oracle Management Repository. After the data is collected and loaded into the repository, the performance data can be viewed on the End-User Performance page of the Web Application home page in the Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control.

If you are managing an earlier version of the Oracle Application Server using the Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control, you can monitor your Web applications with End-User Response Time Monitoring, but you cannot configure your Oracle Application Server Web Cache instance from within the Grid Control.

Instead, you configure End-User Response Time Monitoring for Oracle Application Server Web Cache 9.0.2 and 9.0.3 by running the chronos_setup script on the computer that hosts your Oracle HTTP Server.

You must run the chronos_setup script as an operating system user with the privilege to write to the document root of your Oracle HTTP Server.

If you have trouble running the script, run it with no arguments to display the help text.

To enable End-User Response Time Monitoring for Oracle Application Server Web Cache 9.0.2 or Oracle Application Server Web Cache 9.0.3, you must run the chronos_setup script three times, each time with a different argument:

Once to configure the document root for each Web server in your Web site

4.4.2.2 Configuring the Document Root for Each Web Server

When you run the chronos_setup script with the webserver argument, the script:

Creates a new directory inside the document root. The directory is called:

oracle_smp_chronos

Installs two files into the oracle_smp_chronos directory:

oracle_smp_chronos.js
oracle_smp_chronos.gif

The oracle_smp_chronos.js must be installed in the document root of each Web server that serves content for your Web site.

Note:

If you have more than one document root, you must run the chronos_setup script on each document root.

For example, if Oracle Application Server Web Cache and your Web server are on different machines and an Oracle Management Agent is present on the Web server machine, you must run the chronos_setup script with the webserver option on the Web Server host to configure the document root for the remote Web server.

If Oracle Application Server Web Cache and your Web server are installed on different machines and you have no plans to install a Management Agent or to monitor the Web server, you will need to create a directory called oracle_smp_chronos under the Web server document root directory, and using FTP, place the oracle_smp_chronos.js file in the oracle_smp_chronos directory.

To configure the document root for each Web server:

Change directory to the /bin directory in the Management Agent home directory.

For example:

$PROMPT> cd AGENT_HOME/bin

Make sure you have write access to the Web server document root directory and then run the script as follows:

Log in to the Oracle Application Server Release 2 (9.0.2) Enterprise Manager Web site and navigate to the Oracle HTTP Server Home Page. The document root is displayed in the General section of the HTTP Server Home Page.

OR

Use a text editor or a command-line search utility to search for the term DocumentRoot in the following Oracle HTTP Server configuration file:

Make sure you have write access to the Oracle Application Server Web Cache directory.

For example, if Web Cache is installed in an Oracle Application Server home directory, you will need access to the IAS_HOME/webcache directory.

Change directory to the /bin directory in the Management Agent home directory.

For example:

$PROMPT> cd /private/agent_home/bin

Run the script as follows:

$PROMPT> ./chronos_setup webcache webcache_installation_directory

Note:

After running chronos_setup, if you cannot restart Oracle Application Server Web Cache, back out of the configuration process by copying the following files back to their original name and location:

internal.xml<timestamp>

webcache.xml<timestamp>

4.4.2.4 Starting End-User Response Time Monitoring

To start End-User Response Time Monitoring, you run the chronos_setup script with the collection argument. The script creates a collection file for the specified target and restarts the agent.

To start End-User Response Time Monitoring:

Log in as the user who installed the Management Agent so you have write access to the following directory:

AGENT_HOME/sysman/emd/collection

Change directory to the /bin directory in the Management Agent home directory.

For example:

$PROMPT> cd AGENT_HOME/bin

Locate the name of the Oracle Application Server Web Cache target.

You can locate the name of the target in one of three ways:

From the Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control, locate the Oracle Application Server Web Cache target on the Targets tab. The name listed in the first column of the Target table is the name you must enter as an argument to the chronos_setup script. Note the use of spaces and underscores.

Search the contents of the targets.xml configuration file, which lists all the targets managed by the Management Agent. Locate the Oracle Application Server Web Cache entry in the file and use the NAME attribute for the Web Cache target. The targets.xml file is located in the following directory of the Management Agent home:

AGENT_HOME/sysman/emd/targets.xml

Use the emctl config agent listtargets command to list the target names and target types currently being monitored by the Management Agent.

Oracle Application Server Web Cache is available as a standalone download from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). The standalone version of Oracle Application Server Web Cache allows you to improve the performance and reliability of your Web server even if you are not using Oracle Application Server.

If you are using standalone Oracle Application Server Web Cache with a third-party Web server, you can still manage Oracle Application Server Web Cache using the Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control. As a result, you can also use End-User Response Time Monitoring to monitor the Web applications that your users access through Oracle Application Server Web Cache.

Configuring End-User Response Time Monitoring for standalone Oracle Application Server Web Cache involves the following steps, which are described in the following sections:

After you have installed and configured Oracle Application Server Web Cache and tested the configuration to be sure your Web site data is being cached, you can then enable End-User Response Time Monitoring.

The procedure for enabling End-User Response Time Monitoring is similar to the procedures documented earlier in this chapter; however, the steps vary depending upon the version of standalone Oracle Application Server Web Cache you are using.

4.4.4 Confirming that End-User Response Time Monitoring is Enabled

When End-User Response Time Monitoring is properly enabled, you will see response time data on the End-User Performance tab of the Web Application home page as shown in Figure 4-2.

However, note that it may take some time for Enterprise Manager to gather and display the end-user monitoring data. You must also be sure that enough users are accessing your Web application so that enough end-user performance data can be gathered and stored in the Oracle Management Repository.

See Also:

"Verifying and Troubleshooting End-User Response Time Monitoring" in the Enterprise Manager online help for more information about confirming that End-User Response Time Monitoring is configured and operating correctly.

4.5 Configuring OC4J for Middle-Tier URL Performance Monitoring

When combined with the tracing features of OC4J, Application Performance Management can gather critical middle-tier performance data about your Web application. Enterprise Manager displays this performance data on the Web Application Performance Page, just below the End-User Response Time Monitoring data.

This feature can be instrumental when you are diagnosing application server and back-end performance issues.

See Also:

"About Monitoring Page Performance" in the Enterprise Manager online help

Before you can begin collecting middle-tier URL performance data and before this data can appear on the Web Application Page Performance page, you must first enable the logging and tracing capabilities of the OC4J instance that you used to deploy your application.

4.5.1 Configuring OC4J Tracing for Middle-Tier URL Monitoring

To configure OC4J tracing so you can begin collecting middle-tier URL performance data:

Navigate to the Web Application home page and click Administration.

Click Configure Web Application OC4Js.

Enterprise Manager displays the Configure Web Application OC4Js page.

For the OC4J instance that you used to deploy your application, select the check box in the Collecting column.

In the Interval (minutes) column, enter the interval at which to collect OC4J tracing data.

The recommended interval setting is 60 minutes.

Click Enable Logging.

Enterprise Manager opens another browser window and displays the Tracing Properties page for the OC4J instance in the Application Server Control.

If you are prompted to log in to the Application Server Control, enter the credentials for the ias_admin adminstrator's account.

Select the following options on the Tracing Properties page:

Enable JDBC/SQL Performance Details

Enable Interactive Trace

Enable Historical Trace

You can use the default values for most of the tracing properties. However, Oracle recommends that you set the Frequency to Generate Trace File (seconds) field to 3600 seconds (equivalent to 60 minutes).

Note that modifying the value in the Trace File Directory field is not supported.

Click Apply.

If this is the first time you are enabling OC4J tracing for this application server, Enterprise Manager displays a message stating that the transtrace application is being deployed. The Application Server Control then prompts you to restart the OC4J instance.

Click Yes to restart the instance and enable the tracing properties.

Return to the Grid Control.

Middle-Tier Performance data should begin to appear on the Web Application Page Performance page as soon as data for the OC4J instance is collected and uploaded into the Management Repository.

4.5.2 Additional Configuration for Monitoring UIX Applications

If you used Oracle User Interface XML (UIX) to build your application, there is an additional configuration step you must perform before you can monitor the middle-tier URLs of your application.

See Also:

Your JDeveloper documentation for information on using UIX to develop Web applications

Before you can monitor the middle-tier URLs of your UIX application, you must do the following: